As M A Bartter, she published a handful of early short stories beginning with "The Eggs of Eden" (December 1974 Galaxy) and also including "Be Ye Perfect" (January 1975 Galaxy) and "The Wallad Blond" (March 1977 Galaxy), but later became much more active in criticism. She finished a PhD in English from the University of Rochester in 1986, with a dissertation titled "Symbol to Scenario: The Atomic Bomb in American Science Fiction, 1930-1960": this was revised for publication as The Way to Ground Zero: The Atomic Bomb in American Science Fiction (1988). During the 1980s she also reviewed regularly for the US critical SemiprozineFantasy Review, and occasionally for TheNew York Review of Science Fiction. Her later scholarly work began to focus on Young Adult sf and questions of sf and Feminism. She was also particularly active in the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, having served as treasurer for several years, and having edited the conference proceedings volume The Utopian Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Twentieth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (anth 2004). In 1992, she began teaching English at Missouri's Truman State University, where she achieved the rank of full professor in 1998, and remained until her retirement in 2008. [TSM]

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We passed a couple of major milestones on 1st August: the SFE is now over 4.5 million words, of which John Clute’s own contribution has now exceeded 2 million. (For comparison, the 1993 second edition was 1.3 million words, and … Continue reading →

We’ve reached a couple of milestones recently. The SFE gallery of book covers now has more than 10,000 images: this one seemed appropriate for the 10,000th. Our series of slideshows of thematically linked covers has continued to grow, and Darren Nash of … Continue reading →

We’ve been talking for a while about new features to add to the SFE, and another one has gone live today: the Gallery, which collects together covers for sf books and links them back to SFE entries. To quote from … Continue reading →